The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London
Written by: Lisa Jardine
Editorial Reviews:
A biography of a brilliant, largely forgotten, maverick - a major figure in the 17th - century cultural and scientific revolutions. Robert Hooke was an engineer, surveyor and scientist who was appointed London's Chief Surveyor after the Great Fire. He worked tirelessly with his great friend Sir Christopher Wren to rebuild London throughout the 1670s, personally creating some notable public and private buildings. Like his friends, Wren and Boyle, he was also a prominent experimentalist; he became the first Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society in London; he was the propounder of Hooke's Law of elasticity, co-discoverer of Boyle's Law for gases, designer of an early balance-spring watch, and a virtuoso performer of gruesome public anatomical dissections of animals. As his intimate and confessional diary records, Hooke's life was rich with melodrama. He came to London, fatherless, aged 13 to seek his fortune. He never married but formed a long-running illicit relationship with his niece (his housekeeper). A dandy and a man of restless energy, a workaholic and an inveterate socialiser, he was a well-known man-about-town, an enthusiastic daily imbiber of the designer drugs of the time: coffee, tea, chocolate and tobacco; he took cannabis for his headaches, and worked late into the night fuelled by "poppy water" (opium). In later life he became unkempt and bedridden by illness, but maintained his social and intellectual activities. He argued with most of his peers, but his closest friendship, with Wren, remained unscathed. After violent rows with Sir Isaac Newton his name was wiped from the records of the Royal Society and his portrait destroyed after his death.
If you like "The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London, you might also like ...
Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but unsatisfying...
Comment: I was looking for a good introduction to Hooke and his contributions, and got part of that. Lisa Jardine shows us a man of great energy, great diversity, great precision and artistry. Yet as she tells the story she writes out of a background of knowledge of Hooke which she doesn't detail for us. For example: apparently Hooke had a long-standing interest in a universal language - but we only notice this at the end of the book; apparently he had a pattern of contesting prior discoveries, but she doesn't exhibit this pattern for us; the zenith telescope seems to be very important for Hooke - it's not shown why here.
Coupled with the fact that her plan is not chronologically structured, the timeline is not all that clear to me as a reader, but rather I have a cloudy impression of Hooke's life read out of the largely inimical view of Newton and the self-obsessed Royal Society with their treatment of Hooke as a rather difficult servant, toally at their beck and call.
I'm glad to have read the book - but I'm keen to read a better one.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Curious Life of Robert Hooke
Comment: Definitely not for the casual reader or the faint-hearted but an excellent read all the same. You will need to be pretty curious about Mr. Hooke and his cantankerous personality to navigate this book. The extensive use of quotes from original texts and letters provides the story with authenticity that is admirable but sometimes, makes it a little laborious read. I suspect it is important to understand how Hooke was hooked on patent medicines and opiates, not to say the odd heavy metal, but constantly reading about his vomiting habits is not for the squeamish, particularly at the breakfast table. However this is a great read and I came out of it feeling more sympathetic about Hooke who accomplished more in each month of his life than most of us do in a lifetime. Certainly Lisa Jardine made a comprehensive effort to capture the whole man and succeeded perhaps a little too much.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Curious Life of Robert Hook
Comment:
This book is an interesting read, though it is sort of dry. My interest did not really get aroused by the book until the Great Fire and the rebuilding. Maybe I know too much about Robert Hook and the first part of the book was only a rehash of what I was already familiar with. I have always known about the Great Fire and the damage to the city, but had no idea of what went on in the effort to rebuild. Of course Sir Christopher Wren has always been "the man who built London after the fire" and this book does give a little more realistic description of how the interests of the various groups (the Royals, the Corporation of London, the Royal Society and the average citizen) were accomodated in the rebuilding.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Hooked on Hooke
Comment: I've been fascinated by Robert Hooke since studying science in the 1970s. Less well known than Newton or Wren but arguably at least as influential today, even if that influence is less obvious.
Who is Robert Hooke? Lisa Jardine does a great job of breathing life into a man whose greatest misfortune, perhaps, is contributing so much across so many fields. A true polymath, with a brilliant mind.
Highly recommended to those who want to know more about the development of science in the 17th century. The man himself may not be especially endearing, but his scientific learning is particularly enduring.
Customer Rating:
Summary: REVIEW OF LISA JARDINE'S ROBERT HOOKE BY JOHN CHUCKMAN
Comment: Robert Hooke's life was curious, a neglected topic that makes good reading, although a full, living sense of this man is missing from the book.
He was an ingenious, creative man, abounding with energy and interests in his younger years, whose acquaintances and friends included Boyle, Pepys, and Wren. He was widely recognized as a physics and general science experimenter of exceptional ability - a designer of both accurate instruments and experiments in which to employ them - almost certainly the greatest of his day. He might be viewed from today's perspective as something of the Ernest Lawrence of his day versus the great theorists.
Hooke's interests included astronomical measurements, microscopy, fossils, watches, the behavior of gases, and more. He was also interested in theoretical concepts although his mathematical abilities fell far short of people like Newton or Leibniz. Still, he came up with the hypothesis of the inverse-square law for gravity which he sent to Newton, asking him to prove mathematically whether it was valid. Newton never gave Hooke appropriate credit for Hooke's early insight, and it is not clear whether this was owing to Hooke's annoying carping or Newton's own very unpleasant temperament.
Hooke's early musings on the layers of fossils found on his native Isle of Wight demonstrate a remarkable analytical and creative mind at work. He got the process of their formation pretty close to right lifetimes before the meaning of fossils was widely recognized in science.
Ms. Jardine made the happy discovery of what is likely Hooke's portrait (no known one survives), a picture that had long been identified as being of John Ray. The circumstances of her discovery make a wonderful little tale early in the book.
What comes through so strongly from some of Jardine's anecdotes is how the basic philosophy of science had advanced by the second half of the 17th century, Hooke's time. This was, after all, only a few decades after Francis Bacon, yet the main points of modern science seem to be assumed by Europe's leading tinkerers and scientists.
Hooke's story is not a happy one, but I will leave that for readers to discover. Ms. Jardine is at times a slightly awkward writer, but she has an interesting story to tell and, on the whole, she tells it well. Ms. Jardine also wrote On a Grander Scale, a biography of the wonderful Christopher Wren. The book on Hooke she regards as a companion volume to the one on Wren. Do read both.
Format: Bargain Price
Label: HarperCollins
Manufacturer: HarperCollins
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 432
Publication Date: 2004-02
Publisher: HarperCollins
Release Date: 2004-02-03
Studio: HarperCollins
 | Format: Hardcover List Price: $27.95 Our Price: $15.35 Your Save: $ 12.60 ( 45% ) Availability: N/A Average Customer Rating:  |
Editorial Reviews:
A biography of a brilliant, largely forgotten, maverick - a major figure in the 17th - century cultural and scientific revolutions. Robert Hooke was an engineer, surveyor and scientist who was appointed London's Chief Surveyor after the Great Fire. He worked tirelessly with his great friend Sir Christopher Wren to rebuild London throughout the 1670s, personally creating some notable public and private buildings. Like his friends, Wren and Boyle, he was also a prominent experimentalist; he became the first Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society in London; he was the propounder of Hooke's Law of elasticity, co-discoverer of Boyle's Law for gases, designer of an early balance-spring watch, and a virtuoso performer of gruesome public anatomical dissections of animals. As his intimate and confessional diary records, Hooke's life was rich with melodrama. He came to London, fatherless, aged 13 to seek his fortune. He never married but formed a long-running illicit relationship with his niece (his housekeeper). A dandy and a man of restless energy, a workaholic and an inveterate socialiser, he was a well-known man-about-town, an enthusiastic daily imbiber of the designer drugs of the time: coffee, tea, chocolate and tobacco; he took cannabis for his headaches, and worked late into the night fuelled by "poppy water" (opium). In later life he became unkempt and bedridden by illness, but maintained his social and intellectual activities. He argued with most of his peers, but his closest friendship, with Wren, remained unscathed. After violent rows with Sir Isaac Newton his name was wiped from the records of the Royal Society and his portrait destroyed after his death.
If you like "The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London, you might also like ...
Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but unsatisfying...
Comment: I was looking for a good introduction to Hooke and his contributions, and got part of that. Lisa Jardine shows us a man of great energy, great diversity, great precision and artistry. Yet as she tells the story she writes out of a background of knowledge of Hooke which she doesn't detail for us. For example: apparently Hooke had a long-standing interest in a universal language - but we only notice this at the end of the book; apparently he had a pattern of contesting prior discoveries, but she doesn't exhibit this pattern for us; the zenith telescope seems to be very important for Hooke - it's not shown why here.
Coupled with the fact that her plan is not chronologically structured, the timeline is not all that clear to me as a reader, but rather I have a cloudy impression of Hooke's life read out of the largely inimical view of Newton and the self-obsessed Royal Society with their treatment of Hooke as a rather difficult servant, toally at their beck and call.
I'm glad to have read the book - but I'm keen to read a better one.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Curious Life of Robert Hooke
Comment: Definitely not for the casual reader or the faint-hearted but an excellent read all the same. You will need to be pretty curious about Mr. Hooke and his cantankerous personality to navigate this book. The extensive use of quotes from original texts and letters provides the story with authenticity that is admirable but sometimes, makes it a little laborious read. I suspect it is important to understand how Hooke was hooked on patent medicines and opiates, not to say the odd heavy metal, but constantly reading about his vomiting habits is not for the squeamish, particularly at the breakfast table. However this is a great read and I came out of it feeling more sympathetic about Hooke who accomplished more in each month of his life than most of us do in a lifetime. Certainly Lisa Jardine made a comprehensive effort to capture the whole man and succeeded perhaps a little too much.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Curious Life of Robert Hook
Comment:
This book is an interesting read, though it is sort of dry. My interest did not really get aroused by the book until the Great Fire and the rebuilding. Maybe I know too much about Robert Hook and the first part of the book was only a rehash of what I was already familiar with. I have always known about the Great Fire and the damage to the city, but had no idea of what went on in the effort to rebuild. Of course Sir Christopher Wren has always been "the man who built London after the fire" and this book does give a little more realistic description of how the interests of the various groups (the Royals, the Corporation of London, the Royal Society and the average citizen) were accomodated in the rebuilding.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Hooked on Hooke
Comment: I've been fascinated by Robert Hooke since studying science in the 1970s. Less well known than Newton or Wren but arguably at least as influential today, even if that influence is less obvious.
Who is Robert Hooke? Lisa Jardine does a great job of breathing life into a man whose greatest misfortune, perhaps, is contributing so much across so many fields. A true polymath, with a brilliant mind.
Highly recommended to those who want to know more about the development of science in the 17th century. The man himself may not be especially endearing, but his scientific learning is particularly enduring.
Customer Rating:
Summary: REVIEW OF LISA JARDINE'S ROBERT HOOKE BY JOHN CHUCKMAN
Comment: Robert Hooke's life was curious, a neglected topic that makes good reading, although a full, living sense of this man is missing from the book.
He was an ingenious, creative man, abounding with energy and interests in his younger years, whose acquaintances and friends included Boyle, Pepys, and Wren. He was widely recognized as a physics and general science experimenter of exceptional ability - a designer of both accurate instruments and experiments in which to employ them - almost certainly the greatest of his day. He might be viewed from today's perspective as something of the Ernest Lawrence of his day versus the great theorists.
Hooke's interests included astronomical measurements, microscopy, fossils, watches, the behavior of gases, and more. He was also interested in theoretical concepts although his mathematical abilities fell far short of people like Newton or Leibniz. Still, he came up with the hypothesis of the inverse-square law for gravity which he sent to Newton, asking him to prove mathematically whether it was valid. Newton never gave Hooke appropriate credit for Hooke's early insight, and it is not clear whether this was owing to Hooke's annoying carping or Newton's own very unpleasant temperament.
Hooke's early musings on the layers of fossils found on his native Isle of Wight demonstrate a remarkable analytical and creative mind at work. He got the process of their formation pretty close to right lifetimes before the meaning of fossils was widely recognized in science.
Ms. Jardine made the happy discovery of what is likely Hooke's portrait (no known one survives), a picture that had long been identified as being of John Ray. The circumstances of her discovery make a wonderful little tale early in the book.
What comes through so strongly from some of Jardine's anecdotes is how the basic philosophy of science had advanced by the second half of the 17th century, Hooke's time. This was, after all, only a few decades after Francis Bacon, yet the main points of modern science seem to be assumed by Europe's leading tinkerers and scientists.
Hooke's story is not a happy one, but I will leave that for readers to discover. Ms. Jardine is at times a slightly awkward writer, but she has an interesting story to tell and, on the whole, she tells it well. Ms. Jardine also wrote On a Grander Scale, a biography of the wonderful Christopher Wren. The book on Hooke she regards as a companion volume to the one on Wren. Do read both.
Technical Details
Binding: HardcoverFormat: Bargain Price
Label: HarperCollins
Manufacturer: HarperCollins
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 432
Publication Date: 2004-02
Publisher: HarperCollins
Release Date: 2004-02-03
Studio: HarperCollins
